Friendship

Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal
relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend
for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves
some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to
our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends
must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral
concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as
persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning
the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is
permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as
well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of
friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem
to conflict.

Friendship essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your
friend, a concern which might reasonably be understood as a kind of
love. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally
distinguished three notions that can properly be called love:
agape, eros, and philia.
Agape
is a kind of love that does not respond to the antecedent value of
its object but instead is thought to create value in the
beloved; it has come through the Christian tradition to mean the sort
of love God has for us persons as well as, by extension, our love for
God and our love for humankind in general. By
contrast, eros
and philia are generally understood to be responsive to the
merits of their objects—to the beloved's properties, especially
his goodness or beauty. The difference is that eros is a kind
of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual in nature,
whereas ‘philia’
originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling
towards not just one's friends but also possibly towards family
members, business partners, and one's country at large (Liddell et
al., 1940; Cooper, 1977a). Given this classification of kinds of love,
philia seems to be that which is most clearly relevant to
friendship (though just what philia amounts to needs to be
clarified in more detail).

For this reason, love and friendship often get lumped together as a
single topic; nonetheless, there are significant differences between
them. As understood here, love is an evaluative attitude
directed at particular persons as such, an attitude which we might
take towards someone whether or not that love is reciprocated and
whether or not we have an established relationship with
her.[1]
Friendship, by contrast, is essentially a kind of
relationship grounded in a particular kind of special concern
each has for the other as the person she is; and whereas we must make
conceptual room for the idea of unrequited love, unrequited friendship
is senseless. Consequently, accounts of friendship tend to understand
it not merely as a case of reciprocal love of some form (together with
mutual acknowledgment of this love), but as essentially involving
significant interactions between the friends—as being in this
sense a certain kind of relationship.

Nonetheless, questions can be raised about precisely how to
distinguish romantic relationships, grounded in eros, from
relationships of friendship, grounded in philia, insofar as
each involves significant interactions between the involved parties
that stem from a kind of reciprocal love that is responsive to merit.
Clearly the two differ insofar as romantic love normally has a kind of
sexual involvement that friendship lacks; yet, as Thomas (1989) asks,
is that enough to explain the real differences between them? Badhwar
(2003, 65–66) seems to think so, claiming that the sexual
involvement enters into romantic love in part through a passion and
yearning for physical union, whereas friendship involves instead a
desire for a more psychological identification. Yet it is not clear
exactly how to understand this: precisely what kind of
“psychological identification” or intimacy is
characteristic of friendship? (For further discussion,
see Section 1.2.)

In philosophical discussions of friendship, it is common to follow
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII) in distinguishing
three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of
virtue. Although it is a bit unclear how to understand these
distinctions, the basic idea seems to be that pleasure, utility, and
virtue are the reasons we have in these various kinds of relationships
for loving our friend. That is, I may love my friend because of the
pleasure I get out of her, or because of the ways in which she is
useful to me, or because I find her to have a virtuous
character. Given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds
of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake
and not for your own.

There is an apparent tension here between the idea that friendship
essentially involves being concerned for your friend for his sake and
the idea of pleasure and utility friendships: how can you be concerned
for him for his sake if you do that only because of the pleasure or
utility you get out of it? If you benefit your friend because,
ultimately, of the benefits you receive, it would seem that you do not
properly love your friend for his sake, and so your relationship is
not fully one of friendship after all. So it looks like pleasure and
utility friendships are at best deficient modes of friendship; by
contrast, virtue friendships, because they are motivated by the
excellences of your friend's character, are genuine, non-deficient
friendships. For this reason, most contemporary accounts, by focusing
their attention on the non-deficient forms of friendship, ignore
pleasure and utility
friendships.[2]

As mentioned in the first paragraph of this section, philia
seems to be the kind of concern for other persons that is most
relevant to friendship, and the word, ‘philia,’
sometimes gets translated as friendship; yet philia is in
some ways importantly different from what we ordinarily think of as
friendship. Thus,
‘philia’ extends not just to friends but also to
family members, business associates, and one's country at
large. Contemporary accounts of friendship differ on whether family
members, in particular one's children before they become adults, can
be friends. Most philosophers think not, understanding friendship to
be essentially a relationship among equals; yet some philosophers
(such as Friedman 1989; Rorty 1986/1993; Badhwar 1987) explicitly
intend their accounts of friendship to include parent-child
relationships, perhaps through the influence of the historical notion
of philia. Nonetheless, there do seem to be significant
differences between, on the one hand, parental love and the
relationships it generates and, on the other hand, the love of one's
friends and the relationships it generates; the focus here will be on
friendship more narrowly construed.

In philosophical accounts of friendship, several themes recur
consistently, although various accounts differ in precisely how they
spell these out. These themes are: mutual caring (or love), intimacy,
and shared activity; these will be considered in turn.

A necessary condition of friendship, according to just about every
view (Telfer 1970–71, Annas 1988; Annas 1977, Annis 1987,
Badhwar 1987, Millgram 1987, Sherman 1987, Thomas 1989; Thomas 1993;
Thomas 1987, Friedman 1993; Friedman 1989, Whiting 1991, Hoffman 1997,
Cocking & Kennett 1998, and White 1999a; White 1999b; White 2001)
is that the friends each care about the other, and do so for her sake;
in effect, this is to say that the friends must each love the
other. Although many accounts of friendship do not analyze such mutual
caring any further, among those that do there is considerable
variability as to how we should understand the kind of caring involved
in friendship. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that caring
about someone for his sake involves both sympathy and action on the
friend's behalf. That is, friends must be moved by what happens to
their friends to feel the appropriate emotions: joy in their
friends’ successes, frustration and disappointment in their
friends’ failures (as opposed to disappointment in the friends
themselves), etc. Moreover, in part as an expression of their caring
for each other, friends must normally be disposed to promote the
other's good for her sake and not out of any ulterior
motive. (However, see Velleman 1999 for a dissenting view.)

To care about something is generally to find it worthwhile or valuable
in some way; caring about one's friend is no exception. A central
difference among the various accounts of mutual caring is the way in
which these accounts understand the kind of evaluation implicit
therein. Most accounts understand that evaluation to be a matter of
appraisal: we care about our friends at least in part because of the
good qualities of their characters that we discover them to have
(Annas 1977; Sherman 1987; Whiting 1991); this is in line with the
understanding of love as philia or eros given in the
first paragraph of Section 1 above. Other accounts, however,
understand caring as in part a matter of bestowing value on your
beloved: in caring about a friend, we thereby project a kind of
intrinsic value onto him; this is in line with the understanding of
love as agape given above.

Friedman (1989, 6) argues for bestowal, saying that if we were to
base our friendship on positive appraisals of our friend's
excellences, “to that extent our commitment to that
person is subordinate to our commitment to the relevant [evaluative]
standards and is not intrinsically a commitment to that person.”
However, this is too quick, for to appeal to an appraisal of the good
qualities of your friend's character in order to justify your
friendship is not on its own to subordinate your friendship to that
appraisal. Rather, through the friendship, and through changes in your
friend over time, you may come to change your evaluative outlook,
thereby in effect subordinating your commitment to certain values to
your commitment to your friend. Of course, within friendship the
influence need not go only one direction: friends influence each
other's conceptions of value and how to live. Indeed, that friends
have a reciprocal effect on each other is a part of the concern for
equality many find essential to friendship, and it is central to the
discussion of intimacy in Section 1.2.

(For more on the notion of caring about another for her sake and the
variety of philosophical accounts of it, see the entry
on love.)

The relationship of friendship differs from other interpersonal
relationships, even those characterized by mutual caring, such as
relationships among colleagues: friendships are, intuitively,
“deeper,” more intimate relationships. The
question facing any philosophical account is how that characteristic
intimacy of friendship is to be understood.

On this point, there is considerable variation in the
literature—so much that it raises the question whether differing
accounts aim at elucidating the same object. For it seems as though
when the analysis of intimacy is relatively weak, the aim is to
elucidate what might be called “acquaintance friendships”;
as the analysis of intimacy gets stronger, the aim seems to tend
towards closer friendships and even to a kind of ideal of maximally
close friendship. It might be asked whether one or another of these
types of friendship ought to take priority in the analysis, such that,
for example, cases of close friendship can be understood to be an
enhanced version of acquaintance friendship, or whether acquaintance
friendship should be understood as being deficient in various ways
relative to ideal friendship. Nonetheless, in what follows, views
will be presented roughly in order from weaker to stronger accounts of
intimacy.

To begin, Thomas (1987; 1989; 1993) claims that we should
understand what is here called the intimacy of friendship in terms of
mutual self-disclosure: I tell my friends things about myself that I
would not dream of telling others, and I expect them to make me privy
to intimate details of their lives. The point of such mutual
self-disclosure, Thomas argues, is to create the “bond of
trust” essential to friendship, for through such self-disclosure
we simultaneously make ourselves vulnerable to each other and
acknowledge the goodwill the other has for us. Such a bond of trust is
what institutes the kind of intimacy characteristic of
friendship. (Similar ideas can be found in Annis 1987.)

It is not the sharing of private information nor even of very personal
information, as such, that contributes to the bonds of trust and
intimacy between companion friends. At best it is the sharing of what
friends care about that is relevant here. [518]

Their point is that the secrets view underestimates the kind of trust
at issue in friendship, conceiving of it largely as a matter of
discretion. Given the way friendship essentially involves each caring
about the other's good for the other's sake and so acting on behalf of
the other's good, entering into and sustaining a relationship
of friendship will normally involve considerable trust in your
friend's goodwill towards you generally, and not just concerning your
secrets. Moreover, friendship will normally involve trust in your
friend's judgment concerning what is in your best interests, for when
your friend sees you harming yourself, she ought, other things being
equal, to intervene, and through the friendship you can come to rely
on her to do so.

Such enhanced trust can lead to “shared interests or enthusiasms
or views … [or] a similar style of mind or way of thinking
which makes for a high degree of empathy” (Telfer 1970–71,
227). Telfer finds such shared interests central to the “sense
of a bond” friends have, an idea similar to the
“solidarity”—the sharing of values and a sense of
what's important—that White (2001) advocates as central to
friendship. For trusting my friend's assessments of my good in this
way seemingly involves trusting not only that she understands who I am
and that I find certain things valuable and important in life
but also and centrally that she understands the value of
these things that are so meaningful to me. That in turn seems to be
grounded the empathy we have for each other—the shared sense of
what's important. So Telfer and White, in appealing to such shared
sense of value, are offering a somewhat richer sense of the sort of
intimacy essential to friendship than Thomas and Annis.

An important question to ask, however, is what precisely is meant by
the “sharing” of a sense of value. Once again there are
weaker and stronger versions. On the weak side, a sense of value is
shared in the sense that a coincidence of interests and values is a
necessary condition of developing and sustaining a friendship; when
that happy coincidence dissipates, so too does the friendship. It is
possible to read Annas's summary of Aristotle's view of friendship
this way (1988, 1):

A friend, then, is one who (1) wishes and does good (or apparently
good) things to a friend, for the friend's sake, (2) wishes the friend
to exist and live, for his own sake, (3) spends time with his friend,
(4) makes the same choices as his friend and (5) finds the same things
pleasant and painful as his friend.

(4) and (5) are the important claims for present purposes: making the
same choices as your friend, if done consistently, depends on having a
similar outlook on what reasons there are so to choose, and this point
is reinforced in (5) given Aristotle's understanding of pleasure and
pain as evaluative and so as revealing what is (apparently) good and
bad. The message might be that merely having coincidence in evaluative
outlook is enough to satisfy (4) and (5).

Of course, Aristotle (and Annas) would reject this reading: friends do
not merely have such similarities antecedent to their friendship as a
necessary condition of friendship. Rather, friends can influence and
shape each other's evaluative outlook, so that the sharing of a sense
of value is reinforced through the dynamics of their relationship. One
way to make sense of this is through the Aristotelian idea that
friends function as a kind of mirror of each other: insofar as
friendship rests on similarity of character, and insofar as I can have
only imperfect direct knowledge about my own character, I can best
come to know myself—both the strengths and weaknesses of my
character—by knowing a friend who reflects my qualities of
character. Minor differences between friends, as when my friend on
occasion makes a choice I would not have made, can lead me to reflect
on whether this difference reveals a flaw in my own character that
might need to be fixed, thereby reinforcing the similarity of my and
my friend's evaluative outlooks. On this reading of the mirroring
view, my friend plays an entirely passive role: just by being himself,
he enables me to come to understand my own character better (cf.
Badhwar 2003).[3]

Cocking & Kennett (1998) argue against such a mirroring view in
two ways. First, they claim that this view places too much emphasis on
similarity as motivating and sustaining the friendship. Friends can be
very different from each other, and although within a friendship there
is a tendency for the friends to become more and more alike, this
should be understood as an effect of friendship, not
something constitutive of it. Second, they argue that the appeal to
the friend's role as a mirror to explain the increasing similarity
involves assigning too much passivity to the friend. Our friends, they
argue, play a more active role in shaping us, and the mirroring view
fails to acknowledge this. (Cocking & Kennett's views will be
discussed further below. Lynch (2005) provides further criticisms of
the mirroring view, arguing that the differences between friends can
be central and important to their friendship.)

In an interesting twist on standard accounts of the sense in which
(according to Aristotle, at least) a friend is a mirror, Millgram
(1987) claims that in mirroring my friend I am causally responsible
for my friend coming to have and sustain the virtues he
has. Consequently, I am in a sense my friend's
“procreator,” and I therefore find myself actualized in my
friend. For this reason, Millgram claims, I come to love my friend in
the same way I love myself, and this explains (a) Aristotle's
otherwise puzzling claim that a friend is “another self,”
(b) why it is that friends are not fungible, given my role as
procreator only of this particular person, and (c) why friendships of
pleasure and utility, which do not involve such procreation, fail to
be genuine friendships. (For more on the problem of fungibility, see
Section 2.1.)
However, in offering this account, Millgram may seem to confound my
being causally necessary for my friend's virtues with my
being responsible for those virtues—to confound my
passive role as a mirror with that of a “procreator,” a
seemingly active role. Millgram's understanding of mirroring does not,
therefore, escape Cocking & Kennett's criticism of mirroring views
as assigning too much passivity to the friend as mirror.

Friedman (1989) offers another way to make sense of the influence my
friend has on my sense of value by appealing to the notion of
bestowal. According to Friedman, the intimacy of friendship takes the
form of a commitment friends have to each other as unique persons, a
commitment in which the

friend's successes become occasions for joy; her judgments may provoke
reflection or even deference; her behavior may encourage emulation;
and the causes which she champions may inspire devotion….
One's behavior toward the friend takes its appropriateness, at least
in part, from her goals and aspirations, her needs,
her character—all of which one feels prima
facie invited to acknowledge as worthwhile just because they are
hers. [4]

As noted in the 3rd paragraph of
Section 1.1,
Friedman thinks my commitment to my friend cannot be grounded in
appraisals of her, and so my acknowledgment of the worth of her goals,
etc., is a matter of my bestowing value on these: her ends become valuable
to me, and so suitable for motivating my actions, “just because
they are hers.” That is, such a commitment involves taking my
friend seriously, where this means something like finding her values,
interests, reasons, etc. provide me with pro tanto reasons
for me to value and think
similarly.[4]
In this way, the dynamics of the friendship relation involves friends
mutually influencing each other's sense of value, which thereby
comes to be shared in a way that underwrites significant intimacy.

In part, Friedman's point is that sharing an evaluative perspective in
the way that constitutes the intimacy of friendship involves coming to
adopt her values as parts of my own sense of value. Whiting (1991)
argues that such an approach fails properly to make sense of the idea
that I love my friend for her sake. For to require that my
friend's values be my own is to blur the distinction between valuing
these things for her sake and valuing them for my own. Moreover,
Whiting (1986) argues, to understand my concern for her for her sake
in terms of my concern for things for my sake raises the question of
how to understand this latter concern. However, Whiting thinks the
latter is at least as unclear as the former, as is revealed when we
think about the long-term and my connection and responsibility to my
“future selves.” The solution, she claims, is to
understand the value of my ends (or yours) to be independent of the
fact that they are mine (or yours): these ends are intrinsically
valuable, and that's why I should care about them, no matter
whose ends they are. Consequently, the reason I have to care for
myself, including my future selves, for my sake is the same
as the reason I have to care about my friend for her sake:
because I recognize the intrinsic value of the (excellent)
character she or I have (Whiting 1991, 10; for a similar view,
see Keller 2000). Whiting therefore advocates what she calls an
“impersonal” conception of friendship: There are
potentially many people exhibiting (what I would consider to be)
excellences of character, and these are my impersonal friends
insofar as they are all “equally worthy of my concern”;
what explains but does not justify my “differential and
apparently personal concern for only some … [is] largely
a function of historical and psychological accident” (1991,
23).

It should be clear that Whiting does not merely claim that friends
share values only in that these values happen to coincide; if that
were the case, her conception of friendship would be vulnerable to the
charge that the friends really are not concerned for each other but
merely for the intrinsically valuable properties that each
exemplifies. Rather, Whiting thinks that part of what makes my concern
for my friend be for her sake is my being committed to remind her of
what's really valuable in life and to foster within her a commitment
to these values so as to prevent her from going astray. Such a
commitment on my part is clearly a commitment to her, and a
relationship characterized by such a commitment on both sides is one
that consistently and non-accidentally reinforces the sharing of these values.

Brink (1999) criticizes Whiting's account of friendship as too
impersonal because it fails to understand the relationship of
friendship itself to be intrinsically valuable. (For similar
criticisms, see Jeske 1997.) In part, the complaint is the same as
that which Friedman (1989) offered against any conception of
friendship that bases that friendship on appraisals of the friend's
properties (cf. the 3rd paragraph of
Section 1.1 above):
such a conception of friendship subordinates our concern for the
friend to our concern for the values, thereby neglecting what makes
friendship a distinctively personal relationship. Given Whiting's
understanding of the sense in which friends share values in terms of
their appeal to the intrinsic and impersonal worth of those values, it seems
that she cannot make much of the rebuttal to Friedman offered above:
that I can subordinate my concern for certain values to my concern for
my friend, thereby changing my values in part out of concern for my
friend. Nonetheless, Brink's criticism goes deeper:

Unless our account of love and friendship attaches intrinsic
significance to the historical relationship between friends, it seems
unable to justify concern for the friend qua friend. [1999,
270]

It is only in terms of the significance of the historical
relationship, Brink argues, that we can make sense of the reasons for
friendship and for the concern and activity friendship demands as
being agent-relative (and so in this way personal) rather than
agent-neutral (or impersonal, as for
Whiting).[5]

Cocking & Kennett (1998), in what might be a development of Rorty
(1986/1993), offer an account of close friendship in part in terms of
the friends playing a more active role in transforming each other's
evaluative outlook: in friendship, they claim, we are
“receptive” to having our friends “direct” and
“interpret” us and thereby change our interests. To be
directed by your friend is to allow her interests, values,
etc. to shape your own; thus, your friend may suggest that you go to
the opera together, and you may agree to go, even though you have no
antecedent interest in the opera. Through his interest, enthusiasm,
and suggestion (“Didn't you just love the concluding duet of Act
III?”), you may be moved directly by him to acquire an interest
in opera only because he's your friend. To be interpreted by
your friend is to allow your understanding of yourself, in particular
of your strengths and weaknesses, to be shaped by your friend's
interpretations of you. Thus, your friend may admire your tenacity (a
trait you did not realize you had), or be amused by your excessive
concern for fairness, and you may come as a result to develop a new
understanding of yourself, and potentially change yourself, in direct
response to his interpretation of you. Hence, Cocking & Kennett
claim, “the self my friend sees is, at least in part, a product
of the friendship” (505). (Nehamas 2010 offers a similar account
of the importance of the interpretation of one's friends in
determining who one is, though Nehamas emphasizes in a way that
Cocking & Kennett do not that your interpretation of your friend
can reveal possible valuable ways to be that you yourself “could
never have even imagined beforehand” (287).)

It is a bit unclear what your role is in being thus
directed and interpreted by your friend. Is it a matter of merely
passively accepting the direction and interpretation? This is
suggested by Cocking & Kennett's understanding of friendship in
terms of a receptivity to being drawn by your friend and
by their apparent understanding of this receptivity in dispositional
terms. Yet this would seem to be a matter of ceding your autonomy to
your friend, and that is surely not what they intend. Rather, it
seems, we are at least selective in the ways in which we allow our
friends to direct and interpret us, and we can resist other directions
and interpretations. However, this raises the question of why we allow
any such direction and interpretation. One answer would be because we
recognize the independent value of the interests of our friends, or
that we recognize the truth of their interpretations of us. But this
would not explain the role of friendship in such direction and
interpretation, for we might just as easily accept such direction and
interpretation from a mentor or possibly even a stranger. This
shortcoming might push us to understanding our receptivity to
direction and interpretation not in dispositional terms but rather in
normative terms: other things being equal, we ought to accept
direction and interpretation from our friends precisely because they
are our friends. And this might push us to a still stronger conception
of intimacy, of the sharing of values, in terms of which we can
understand why friendship grounds these norms.

Such a stronger conception of intimacy is provided in Sherman's
interpretation of Aristotle's account (Sherman 1987). According to
Sherman's Aristotle, an important component of friendship is that
friends identify with each other in the sense that they exhibit a
“singleness of mind.” This includes, first, a kind of
sympathy, whereby I feel on my friend's behalf the same emotions he
does. Unlike similar accounts, Sherman explicitly includes pride and
shame as emotions I sympathetically feel on behalf of my
friend—a significant addition because of the role pride and
shame have in constituting our sense of ourselves and even our
identities (Taylor 1985). In part for this reason, Sherman claims that
“through the sense of belonging and attachment” we attain
because of such sympathetic pride and shame, “we identify with
and share their [our friends’] good”
(600).[6]

Second, and more important, Sherman's Aristotle understands the
singleness of mind that friends have in terms of shared processes of
deliberation. Thus, as she summarizes a passage in Aristotle
(1170b11–12):

character friends live together, not in the way animals do, by sharing
the same pasture, but “by sharing in argument and
thought.” [598]

The point is that the friends “share” a conception of
values not merely in that there is significant overlap between the
values of the one friend and those of the other, and not merely in
that this overlap is maintained through the influence that the friends
have on each other. Rather, the values are shared in the sense that
they are most fundamentally their values, at which they
jointly arrive by deliberating together.

[Friends have] the project of a shared conception of
eudaimonia [i.e., of how best to live]. Through mutual
decisions about specific practical matters, friends begin to express
that shared commitment…. Any happiness or disappointment that
follows from these actions belongs to both persons, for the decision
to so act was joint and the responsibility is thus shared. [598]

The intent of this account, in which what gets shared is, we might
say, an identity that the friends have in common, is not to be
descriptively accurate of particular friendships; it is rather to
provide a kind of ideal that actual friendships at best only
approximate. Such a strong notion of sharing is reminiscent of the
union view of (primarily erotic) love, according to which love
consists in the formation of some significant kind of union, a
“we” (see the entry on
love, the section on
love as union).
Like the union view of love, this account of friendship raises
worries about autonomy. Thus, it seems as though Sherman's Aristotle
does away with any clear distinction between the interests and even
agency of the two friends, thereby undermining the kind of
independence and freedom of self-development that characterizes
autonomy. If autonomy is a part of the individual's good, then
Sherman's Aristotle might be forced to conclude that friendship is to
this extent bad; the conclusion might be, therefore, that we ought to
reject this strong conception of the intimacy of friendship.

It is unclear from Sherman's interpretation of Aristotle whether there
are principled reasons to limit the extent to which we share our
identities with our friends; perhaps an appeal to something like
Friedman's federation model (1998) can help resolve these
difficulties. Friedman's idea is that we should understand romantic
love (but the idea could also be applied to friendship) not in terms
of the union of the two individuals, in which their identities get
subsumed by that union, but rather in terms of the federation of the
individuals—the creation of a third entity that presupposes some
degree of independence of the individuals that make it up. Even so,
much would need to be done to spell out this view satisfactorily. (For
more on Friedman's account, see the entry
on love, the section on
love as union.)

In each of these accounts of the kind of intimacy and commitment that
are characteristic of friendship, we might ask about the conditions
under which friendship can properly be dissolved. Thus, insofar as
friendship involves some such commitment, we cannot just give up on
our friends for no reason at all; nor, it seems, should our commitment
be unconditional, binding on us come what may. Understanding more
clearly when it is proper to break off a friendship, or allow it to
lapse, may well shed light on the kind of commitment and intimacy that
is characteristic of friendship; nonetheless, this issue gets scant
attention in the literature.

A final common thread in philosophical accounts of friendship is
shared activity. The background intuition is this: never to share
activity with someone and in this way to interact with him is not to
have the kind of relationship with him that could be called
friendship, even if you each care for the other for his sake. Rather,
friends engage in joint pursuits, in part motivated by the
friendship itself. These joint pursuits can include not only such
things as making something together, playing together, and talking
together, but also pursuits that essentially involve shared
experiences, such as going to the opera together. Yet for these
pursuits to be properly shared in the relevant sense of
“share,” they cannot involve activities motivated simply
by self interest: by, for example, the thought that I’ll help
you build your fence today if you later help me paint my
house. Rather, the activity must be pursued in part for the purpose of
doing it together with my friend, and this is the point of saying that
the shared activity must be motivated, at least in part, by the
friendship itself.

This raises the following questions: in what sense can such activity
be said to be “shared,” and what is it about friendship
that makes shared activity so central to it? The common answer to this
second question (which helps pin down an answer to the first) is that
shared activity is important because friends normally have shared
interests as a part of the intimacy that is characteristic of
friendship as such, and the “shared” pursuit of such
shared interests is therefore an important part of
friendship. Consequently, the account of shared activity within a
particular theory ought to depend at least in part on that theory's
understanding of the kind of intimacy relevant to friendship. And this
generally seems to be the case: for example, Thomas (1987, 1989,
1993), who argues for a weak conception of intimacy in terms of mutual
self-disclosure, has little place for shared activity in his account
of friendship, whereas Sherman (1987), who argues for a strong
conception of intimacy in terms of shared values, deliberation, and
thought, provides within friendship a central place not just to
isolated shared activities but, more significantly, to a shared
life.

Nonetheless, within the literature on friendship the notion of shared
or joint activity is taken for granted: not much thought has been
given to articulating clearly the sense in which friends share their
activity. This is surprising and unfortunate, especially insofar as
the understanding of the sense in which such activities are
“shared” is closely related to the understanding of
intimacy that is so central to any account of friendship; indeed, a
clear account of the sort of shared activity characteristic of
friendship may in turn shed light on the sort of intimacy it
involves. This means in part that a particular theory of friendship
might be criticized in terms of the way in which its account of the
intimacy of friendship yields a poor account of the sense in which
activity is shared. For example, one might think that we must
distinguish between activity we engage in together in part out of my
concern for someone I love, and activity we share insofar as
we engage in it at least partly for the sake of sharing it; only the
latter, it might be argued, is the sort of shared activity
constitutive of the relationship of friendship as opposed to
that constitutive merely of my concern for him (see Nozick
1989). Consequently, according to this line of thought, any account of
the intimacy of friendship that fails to understand the sharing of
interests in such a way as to make sense of this distinction ought to
be rejected.

Helm (2008) develops an account of shared activity and shared valuing
at least partly with an eye to understanding friendship. He argues
that the sense in which friends share activity is not the sort of
shared intention and plural subjecthood discussed in literature on
shared intention within social philosophy (on which, see Tuomela 1995,
2007; Gilbert 1996, 2000, 2006; Searle 1990; and Bratman 1999), for
such sharing of intentions does not involve the requisite intimacy of
friendship. Rather, the intimacy of friendship should be understood
partly in terms of the friends forming a “plural agent”: a
group of people who have joint cares—a joint evaluative
perspective—which he analyzes primarily in terms of a pattern of
interpersonally connected emotions, desires, judgments, and (shared)
actions. Friendships emerge, Helm claims, when the friends form a
plural agent that cares positively about their relationship, and the
variety of kinds of friendships there can be, including friendships of
pleasure, utility, and virtue, are to be understood in terms of the
particular way in which they jointly understand their relationship to
be something they care about—as tennis buddies or as life
partners, for example.

Friendship clearly plays an important role in our lives; to a large
extent, the various accounts of friendship aim at identifying and
clarifying that role. In this context, it is important to understand
not only why friendship can be valuable, but also what justifies
particular friendships.

One way to construe the question of the value of friendship is in
terms of the individual considering whether to be (or continue to
be) engaged in a friendship: why should I invest considerable time,
energy, and resources in a friend rather than in myself? What makes
friendship worthwhile for me, and so how ought I to evaluate whether
particular friendships I have are good friendships or not?

One sort of answer is that friendship is instrumentally good. Thus,
Telfer (1970–71) claims that friendship is “life
enhancing” in that it makes us “feel more
alive”—it enhances our activities by intensifying our
absorption in them and hence the pleasure we get out of them
(239–40). Moreover, she claims, friendship is pleasant in itself
as well as useful to the friends. Annis (1987) adds that it helps
promote self-esteem, which is good both instrumentally and for its own
sake.

Yet friendship is not merely instrumentally valuable, as is hinted at
by Annis’ claim that “our lives would be significantly
less full given the universal demise of friendship” (1987,
351). Cooper (1977b), interpreting Aristotle, provides two arguments
for why this might be so. First, Cooper's Aristotle claims,
living well requires that one know the goodness of one's own life;
however, given the perpetual possibility of self-deception, one is
able accurately to evaluate one's own life only through friendship, in
which one's friend acts as a kind of mirror of one's self. Hence, a
flourishing life is possible only through the epistemic access
friendship provides. Second, Cooper's Aristotle claims that the
sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship is essential to
one's being able engage in the sort of activities characteristic of
living well “continuously” and “with pleasure and
interest” (310). Such activities include moral and intellectual
activities, activities in which it is often difficult to sustain
interest without being tempted to act otherwise. Friendship, and the
shared values and shared activities it essentially involves, is needed
to reinforce our intellectual and practical understanding of such
activities as worthwhile in spite of their difficulty and the ever
present possibility that our interest in pursuing them will
flag. Consequently, the shared activity of friendship is partly
constitutive of human flourishing.

So far these are attempts to understand the value of friendship to the
individual in terms of the way friendship contributes, instrumentally
or constitutively, to something else that is valuable to the
individual. Yet one might also think that friendship is valuable for
its own sake. Schoeman (1985), partly in response to the individualism
of other accounts of the value of friendship, claims that in
friendship the friends “become a unique community with a being
and value of its own” (280): the intimacy of friendship results
in “a way of being and acting in virtue of being united with
another” (281). Although this claim has intuitive appeal,
Schoeman does not clearly explain what the value of that “unique
community” is or why it should have that value. Indeed, we ought
to expect that fleshing out this claim would involve a substantive
proposal concerning the nature of that community and how it can have a
separate (federated?—cf. Friedman 1998) existence and
value. Once again, the literature on shared intention and plural
subjecthood is relevant here; see, for example, Gilbert 1989, 1996,
2000; Tuomela 1984, 1995; Searle 1990; and Bratman 1999.

A question closely related to this question of the value of friendship
is that of what justifies my being friends with this person rather
than with someone else or no one at all. To a certain extent, answers
to the question of the value of friendship might seem to provide
answers to the question of the justification of friendship. After all,
if the value of friendship in general lies in the way it contributes
(either instrumentally or constitutively) to a flourishing life for
me, then it might seem that I can justify particular friendships in
light of the extent to which they contribute to my
flourishing. Nonetheless, this seems unacceptable because it
suggests—what is surely false—that friends
are fungible.
(To be fungible is to be replaceable by a relevantly similar
object without any loss of value.) That is, if my friend has certain
properties (including, perhaps, relational properties) in virtue of
which I am justified in having her as my friend (because it is in
virtue of those properties that she contributes to my flourishing),
then on this view I would be equally justified in being friends with
anyone else having relevantly similar properties, and so I would have
no reason not to replace my current friend with someone else of this
sort. Indeed, it might even be that I ought to “trade up”
when someone other than my current friend exhibits the relevant
friendship-justifying properties to a greater degree than my friend
does. This is surely objectionable as an understanding of
friendship.

In solving this problem of fungibility, philosophers have typically
focused on features of the historical relationship of friendship (cf.
Brink 1999, quoted above). One approach might be found in Sherman's
1987 union account of friendship discussed above (this type of view
might be suggested by the account of the value of friendship in
Schoeman 1985). If my friend and I form a kind of union in virtue of
our having a shared conception of how to live that is forged and
maintained through a particular history of interaction and sharing of
our lives, and if my sense of my values and identity therefore depends
on these being most fundamentally our values and identity, then it is
simply not possible to substitute another person for my friend without
loss. For this other person could not possibly share the
relevant properties of my friend, namely her historical
relationship with me. However, the price of this solution to the
problem of fungibility, as it arises both for friendship and for love,
is the worry about autonomy raised towards the end of Section 1.2
above.

An alternative solution is to understand these historical, relational
properties of my friend to be more directly relevant to the
justification of our friendship. Thus, Whiting (1991) distinguishes
the reasons we have for initiating a friendship (which are, she
thinks, impersonal in a way that allows for fungibility) from the
reasons we have for sustaining a friendship; the latter, she suggests,
are to be found in the history of concern we have for each
other. However, it is unclear how the historical-relational properties
can provide any additional justification for friendship beyond that
provided by thinking about the value of friendship in general, which
does not solve the fungibility problem. For the mere fact that this is
my friend does not seem to justify my continued friendship:
when we imagine that my friend is going through a rough time so that
he loses those virtues justifying my initial friendship with him, why
shouldn't I just dump him and strike up a new friendship with
someone who has those virtues? It is not clear how the appeal to
historical properties of my friend or our friendship can provide an
answer.

In part the trouble here arises from tacit preconceptions concerning
the nature of justification. If we attempt to justify continued
friendship in terms of the friend's being this particular person, with
a particular historical relationship to me, then it seems like we are
appealing to merely idiosyncratic and subjective properties, which
might explain but cannot justify that friendship. This seems to imply
that justification in general requires the appeal to the friend's
being a type of person, having general, objective properties
that others might share; this leads to the problem of
fungibility. Solving the problem, it might therefore seem, requires
somehow overcoming this preconception concerning justification—a
task which no one has attempted in the literature on friendship.

(For further discussion of this problem of fungibility as it
arises in the context of love, as well as discussion of a related
problem concerning whether the object (rather than the grounds) of
love is a particular person or a type of person, see Section
6 of the entry on
love.)

Another way to construe the question of the value of friendship is in
more social terms: what is the good to society of having its members
engaged in relationships of friendship? Telfer (1970–71, 238)
answers that friendship promotes the general good “by providing
a degree and kind of consideration for others’ welfare which
cannot exist outside it.” Blum (1980) concurs, arguing that
friendship is an important source of moral excellence precisely
because it essentially involves acting for the sake of your friend, a
kind of action that can have considerable moral worth. (For similar
claims, see Annis 1987.)

Cocking & Kennett (2000) argue against this view that friendly
acts per se are morally good, claiming that “I might be
a perfectly good friend. I might just not be a perfectly moral
one” (287). They support this conclusion, within their account
of friendship as involving being directed and interpreted by one's
friend, by claiming that “I am just as likely to be directed by
your interest in gambling at the casino as by your interest in
ballet” (286). However, Cocking & Kennett seem to be
insufficiently sensitive to the idea, which they accept (cf. 284),
that friends care about promoting each other's well-being. For
if I am concerned with your well-being and find you to be about to
embark on an immoral course of action, I ought not, contrary to what
Cocking & Kennett suggest, blindly allow you to draw me into
joining you; rather, I ought to try to stop you or at least get you to
question whether you are doing the right thing—as a matter of my
directing and interpreting you.

These answers to the social value of friendship seem to apply equally
well to love: insofar as love essentially involves both a concern for
your beloved for his sake and, consequently, action on his behalf for
his sake, love will exhibit the same social value. Friedman (1989),
however, argues that friendship itself is socially valuable in a way
that love is not. Understanding the intimacy of friendship in terms of
the sharing of values, Friedman notes that friendship can involve the
mutual support of, in particular, unconventional values, which can be
an important stimulus to moral progress within a community. For
“our commitments to particular persons are, in practice,
necessary counterbalances to our commitments to abstract
moral guidelines, and may, at times, take precedence over them”
(6). Consequently, the institution of friendship is valuable not just
to the individuals but also to the community as a whole.

A growing body of research since the mid-1970s questions the
relationship between the phenomenon of friendship and particular moral
theories. Thus, many (Stocker 1976, 1981; Blum 1980, 1993; Wilcox
1987; Friedman 1989, 1993; Badhwar 1991; Cocking & Oakley 1995)
have criticized consequentialist and deontological moral theories on
the grounds that they are somehow incompatible with friendship and the
kind of reasons and motives that friendship provides. Often, the
appeal to friendship is intended to bypass traditional disputes among
major types of moral theories (consequentialism, deontology, and
virtue ethics), and so the “friendship critique” may seem
especially important and
interesting.[7]

At the root of these questions concerning the relationship between
friendship and morality is the idea that friendship involves
special duties: duties for specific people that arise out of
the relationship of friendship. Thus, it seems that we have
obligations to aid and support our friends that go well beyond those
we have to help strangers because they are our friends, much like we
parents have special duties to aid and support our children because
they are our children. Indeed, Annis (1987) suggests, such duties
“are constitutive of the relationship” of friendship (352;
but see Bernstein (2007) for an argument that friendship does not
involve any requirement of partiality). Given this, the question
arises as to what the relationship is between such special duties of
friendship and other duties, in particular moral duties: can our
obligations to our friends sometimes trump our moral duties, or must
we always subordinate our personal relationships to morality in order
to be properly impartial (as, it might be thought, morality
demands)?

One concern in this neighborhood, articulated by Stocker (1976), is
that the phenomenon of friendship reveals that consequentialist and
deontological moral theories, by offering accounts of what it is right
to do irrespective of the motives we have, promote a kind of
“moral schizophrenia”: a split between our moral
reasons on the one hand and our motives on the other. Such moral
schizophrenia, Stocker argues, prevents us in general from harmonizing
our moral reasons and our motives, and it does so in a way that
destroys the very possibility of our having and sustaining friendships
with others. Given the manifest value of friendship in our lives, this
is clearly a serious problem with these moral theories.

What is it about friendship that generates these problems? One concern
arises out of the teleological conception of action, implicit
in consequentialism, according to which actions are understood in
terms of their ends or purposes. The trouble is, Stocker (1981)
argues, the characteristic actions of friendship cannot be understood
in this way. To be a friend is at least sometimes to be motivated to
act out of a concern for your friend as this individual
(cf. Section 1.1).
Although actions done out of friendship may have ends, what
characterizes these as “friendly acts,” as we might call
them, is not that they are done for any particular purpose:

If acting out of friendship is composed of purposes, dispositions to
have purposes, and the like, where these are purposes properly
so-called, and thus not essentially described by the phrase ‘out
of friendship’, there seems … no guarantee that the
person cares about and likes, has friendship for, the
‘friend’. [Stocker 1981, 756–57]

That is, actions done out of friendship are essentially actions
motivated by a special sort of concern—a concern for this
particular person—which is in part a matter of having settled
habits of response to the friend. This, Stocker concludes, is a kind
of motivation for action that a teleological conception of action
cannot countenance, resulting in moral schizophrenia. (Jeske (2008)
argues for a somewhat different conclusion: that in order to heal this
apparent split between impartial moral obligations and the partial
obligations of friendship, we must abandon the distinction between
moral and nonmoral obligations.)

Stocker (1976) raises another, more general concern for
consequentialism and deontology arising out of a conception of
friendship. Thus, although act consequentialists—those
who justify each particular act by appeal to the goodness of the
consequences of that act, impersonally conceived (see the entry on
consequentialism)—could
justify friendly acts, they “cannot embody their reason in
their motive” (1976, 70), for to be motivated teleologically by
the concern to maximize goodness is not to be motivated out of
friendship. Consequently, either act consequentialists must exhibit
moral schizophrenia, or, to avoid it, they must understand
consequentialist reasons for action to be our motives. However,
because such consequentialist reasons are impersonal, taking this
latter tack would be to leave out the kind of reasons and motives that
are central to friendship, thereby undermining the very institution of
friendship. (Cf. the discussion of impersonal justification of
friendship and the problem of fungibility in
Section 2.1.)

The same is true, Stocker argues, of rule consequentialism
(the view that actions are right if they follow principles or rules
that tend to result in the most good overall, impersonally
conceived—see the entry on
rule-consequentialism)
and of deontology (the view that actions are right just in
case they are in accordance with certain rules or principles that are
binding on all moral agents). For even if rule consequentialism and
deontology can provide moral reasons for friendly actions in terms of
the rule that one must benefit one's friends, for example, such
reasons would be impersonal, giving no special consideration to our
particular friends at all. If we are to avoid moral schizophrenia and
embody this reason in our motives for action, we could not, then, act
out of friendship—out of a concern for our friends for their
sakes. This means that any rule consequentialist or deontologist that
avoids moral schizophrenia can act so as to benefit her friends, but
such actions would be merely as if friendly, not genuinely
friendly, and she could not therefore have and sustain genuine
friendships. The only alternative is to split her moral reasons and
her motives for friendly acts, thereby becoming schizophrenic. (For
some discussion about whether such moral schizophrenia really is as
bad as Stocker thinks, see Woodcock 2010. For concerns similar to
Stocker's about impartial moral theories and motivation for action
arising out of a consideration of personal relationships like
friendship, see Williams 1981.)

Blum (1980) (portions of which are reprinted with slight modifications
in Blum 1993) and Friedman (1993), pick up on this contrast between
the impartiality of consequentialism and deontology and the inherent
partiality of friendship, and argue more directly for a rejection of
such moral theories. Consequentialists and deontologists must think
that relationships like friendship essentially involve a kind of
special concern for the friend and that such relationships therefore
demand that one's actions exhibit a kind of partiality towards the
friend. Consequently, they argue, these impartialist moral theories
must understand friendship to be inherently biased and therefore not
to be inherently moral. Rather, such moral theories can only claim
that to care for another “in a fully morally appropriate
manner” requires caring for him “simply as a human being,
i.e., independent of any special connection or attachment one has with
him” (Blum 1993, 206). It is this claim that Blum and Friedman
deny: although such universalist concern surely has a place in moral
theory, the value—indeed the moral value (cf.
Section 2.2)—of
friendship cannot properly be appreciated except as involving a
concern for another for his sake and as the particular person he
is. Thus, they claim, insofar as consequentialism and deontology are
unable to acknowledge the moral value of friendship, they cannot be
adequate moral theories and ought to be rejected in favor of some
alternative.

In reply, Railton (1984) distinguishes between subjective and
objective consequentialism, arguing that this “friendship
critique” of Stocker and Blum (as well as Friedman) succeeds
only against subjective consequentialism. (See Mason (1998) for
further elaborations of this argument, and see Sadler (2006) for an
alternative response.) Subjective consequentialism is the
view that whenever we face a choice of actions, we should both morally
justify a particular course of action and be motivated to act
accordingly directly by the relevant consequentialist principle
(whether what that principle assesses are particular actions or rules
for action). That is, in acting as one ought, one's subjective
motivations ought to come from those very moral reasons: because this
action promotes the most good (or is in accordance with the rule that
tends to promote the most good). Clearly, Stocker, Blum, and Friedman
are right to think that subjective consequentialism cannot properly
accommodate the motives of friendship.

By contrast, Railton argues, objective consequentialism
denies that there is such a tight connection between the objective
justification of a state of affairs in terms of its consequences and
the agent's motives in acting: the moral justification of a particular
action is one thing (and to be undertaken in consequentialist terms),
but the motives for that action may be entirely separate. This means
that the objective consequentialist can properly acknowledge that
sometimes the best states of affairs result not just from undertaking
certain behaviors, but from undertaking them with certain motives,
including motives that are essentially personal. In particular,
Railton argues, the world would be a better place if each of us had
dispositions to act so as to benefit our friends out of a concern for
their good (and not the general good). So, on
consequentialist grounds each of us has moral reasons to inculcate
such a disposition to friendliness, and when the moment arrives that
disposition will be engaged, so that we are motivated to act out of a
concern for our friends rather than out of an impersonal, impartial
concern for the greater
good.[8]
Moreover, there is no split between our moral reasons for action and
our motives because such reasons may in some cases (such as that of a
friendly act) require that in acting we act out of the appropriate
sort of motive. So the friendship critique of Stocker, Blum, and
Friedman fails.

Badhwar (1991) thinks even Railton's more sophisticated
consequentialism ultimately fails to accommodate the phenomenon of
friendship, and that the moral schizophrenia remains. For, she argues,
a sophisticated consequentialist must both value the friend for the
friend's sake (in order to be a friend at all) and value the friend
only so long as doing so is consistent with promoting the most good
overall (in order to be a consequentialist).

As a non-schizophrenic, un-selfdeceived consequentialist friend,
however, she must put the two thoughts together. And the two thoughts
are logically incompatible. To be consistent she must think, “As
a consequentialist friend, I place special value on you so long, but
only so long, as valuing you thus promotes the overall good.”
… Her motivational structure, in other words, is instrumental,
and so logically incompatible with the logical structure required for
end friendship. [493]

Badhwar is here alluding to a case of Railton's in which, through no
fault of yours or your friend's, the right action according to
consequentialism is to sacrifice your friendship for the greater good.
In such a case, the sophisticated consequentialist must in arriving at
this conclusion “evaluate intrinsic goods [of friendship] and
their virtues by reference to a standard external to
them”—i.e., by reference to the overall good as this is
conceived from an impersonal point of view (496). However, Badhwar
argues, the value of friendship is something we can appreciate only
from a personal point of view, so that the moral rightness of friendly
actions must be assessed only by appeal to an essentially personal
relationship in which we act for the sake of our friends and not for
the sake of producing the most good in general and in indifference to
this particular personal relationship. Therefore, sophisticated
consequentialism, because of its impersonal nature, blinds us to the
value of particular friendships and the moral reasons they provide for
acting out of friendship, all of which can be properly appreciated
only from the personal point of view. In so doing, sophisticated
consequentialism undermines what is distinctive about friendship as
such. The trouble once again is a split between consequentialist
reasons and friendly motivations: a kind of moral schizophrenia.

At this point it might seem that the proper consequentialist reply to
this line of criticism is to refuse to accept the claim that a moral
justification of the value of friendship and friendly actions must be
personal: the good of friendship and the good that friendly actions
promote, a consequentialist should say, are things we must be able to
understand in impersonal terms or they would not enter into a properly
moral justification of the rightness of action. Because
sophisticated consequentialists agree that motivation out of
friendship must be personal, they must reject the idea that the
ultimate moral reasons for acting in these cases are your motives,
thereby rejecting the relatively weak motivational internalism
that is implicit in the friendship critique (for weak
motivational internalism, see the
entry on
moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism,
and in particular the section on
motivational internalism and the action-guiding character of moral judgements).
Indeed, this seems to be Railton's strategy in articulating his
objective consequentialism: to be a good person is to act in
the morally right ways (justified by consequentialism) and so to have,
on balance, motivations that tend to produce right action, even though
in certain cases (including those of friendship) these motivations
need not—indeed cannot—have the consequentialist
justification in view. (For further elaborations of this strategy in
direct response to Badhwar 1991, see Conee 2001 and Card 2004; for a
defense of Railton in opposition to Card's elaboration of
sophisticated consequentialism, see Tedesco 2006.)

This means that the debate at issue in the friendship critique of
consequentialism needs to be carried on in part at the level of a
discussion of the nature of motivation and the connection between
moral reasons and motives. Indeed, such a discussion has implications
for how we should construe the sort of mutual caring that is central
to friendship. For the sophisticated consequentialist would presumably
try to spell out that mutual caring in terms of friendly dispositions
(motives divorced from consequentialist reasons), an attempt which
advocates of the friendship critique would say involves insufficient
attention to the particular person one cares about, insofar as the
caring would not be justified by who she is (motives informed by
personal reasons).

The discussion of friendship and moral theories has so far
concentrated on the nature of practical reason. A similar debate
focuses on the nature of value. Scanlon (1998) uses friendship to
argue against what he calls teleological conceptions of values
presupposed by consequentialism. The teleological view understands
states of affairs to have intrinsic value, and our recognition of such
value provides us with reasons to bring such states of affairs into
existence and to sustain and promote them. Scanlon argues that
friendship involves kinds of reasons—of loyalty, for
example—are not teleological in this way, and so the value of
friendship does not fit into the teleological conception and so cannot
be properly recognized by consequentialism. In responding to this
argument, Hurka (2006) argues that this argument presupposes
a conception of the value of friendship (as something we ought to
respect as well as to promote) that is at odds with the teleological
conception of value and so with teleological conceptions of
friendship. Consequently, the debate must shift to the more general
question about the nature of value and cannot be carried out simply by
attending to friendship.

These conclusions that we must turn to broader issues if we are to
settle the place friendship has in morality reveal that in one sense
the friendship critique has failed: it has not succeeded in making an
end run around traditional debates between consequentialists,
deontologists, and virtue theorists. Yet in a larger sense it has
succeeded: it has forced these moral theories to take personal
relationships seriously and consequently to refine and complicate
their accounts in the process.